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Slashback: Hagiography, Oracle, Fusion
Even lukewarm fusion would be satisfy me. driggers writes: "I wrote a review of the book "Excess Heat" for /. last year. I thought you might (or might not :) be interested to learn that the U.S. Navy in February 2002 issued Technical Report No. 1862 titled "Thermal and Nuclear Aspects of the Pd/D2O System," Vol. 1 of which summarizes A Decade of Research at Navy Laboratories."
Dr. Frank Gordon, Head, Navigation and Applied Sciences Department, concludes his foreword with the remark, "It is time for the government funding organizations to invest in this research."
If you modify the source you must keep it accurate, like a Mad Lib. An Anonymous Coward writes "I just noticed the biography of Richard M. Stallman, "Free as in Freedom" by Sam Williams is online at oreilly, released under the GNU Free Documentation License."
What vapors rule the modern day Oracle? MarkedMan writes: "The following CNET article outlines Oracle's reply to the State of California's announcement it was canceling a nearly $100 million dollar contract. It should not come as a surprise, as few companies would give up that kind of money without a fight, not to mention the domino effect if they just rolled over. It would be a tacit admission that they ripped off naive customers."
yes, but the fact that they posted WHO the winner was had not been posted
I saw a couple copies at my friendly neighborhood Borders, and read about a chapter of it. I was really turned off with the negativity towards Linus Trovalds and various other FS pioneers. The author really went for the throat in the whole GNU/Linux and Open Source vs Free Software issues. I've always found those issues to be the darker side of the Stallman story and would have actually bought the book if it focused more on his work on Emacs, GCC, and the Hurd (I absolute am facinated with the Hurd...).
As it is, it is sitting on a display rack for 20% off without a single copy gone. I'm usually a big defender of Stallman but that book was in really poor taste.
int func(int a);
func((b += 3, b));
"Is any of this due to people switching to the open-source alternatives?"
I think its more complicated than that. Oracle changed its pricing model about 2-3 years ago that was effectively for many customers a huge price rise.
At that time, IBM's UDB and MS's SQL Server suddenly because reasonable alternatives to Oracle.
Oracle has essentially withdrawn that price increase, but I think the damage has been done. Oracle has mindshare and good performance, but I'm not sure that's enough to overcome a the financial side of the equation for Oracle. Time will tell.
Plus...I contend the market for high-end relational database is relatively small anyway. So its possible the world doesn't need any more 6 figure databases.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I think a key point of the "Free as in Freedom" book was the description of the concept of the GPL as codifying a hacker culture of sharing. Certainly the GPL has been an effective and appropriate response to what Richard Stallman apparently saw as essentially the destruction of the MIT AI Lab (and elsewhere) as an academic home for cooperative sharing and collaborative construction. However, it is unfortunate Sam Williams in the book does not touch on the significance of the Bayh-Dole act of 1980 which perhaps unintentionally helped destroy the university culture of sharing in many other places than the MIT AI lab at about the same time. See an article called 'The Kept University' from the Atlantic Monthly: http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2000/03/press.ht m
Perhaps it was not entirely coincidental the AI lab exodus happened
shortly after this law was passed (prior to the act there was not as
much incentive for universities to withhold information or make special
deals with companies directly). In a future edition, relating Richard Stallman's
efforts to that larger legal context of the 1980 Bayh-Dole might be
interesting (I didn't remember it mentioned and the Bayh-Dole act isn't
in the index).
Of course, since the book is under the Gnu Free Documentation License, I guess anyone could make that change -- but then there would need to be somewhere to post updates -- like Savannah?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
It never ceases to amaze me when interesting anomolous results are discarded by the mainstream community. Yes, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs'. But closed cell calorimetry is very hard to do right, and the electrodes are tricky to setup.
But bottom line, its an electrochemical cell that exposes dental x-ray film left next to the jar, and tritium is sometimes produced, all while little intermittent hot spots show up on IR.
So what if "its impossible!" Something interesting is happening, and it deserves to be studied properly, not dismissed...